The Endless Summer Read online

  They had stayed there for the rest of the evening and throughout the night, in the sitting room in front of the empty and dark and cold fireplace. It wasn’t long before first the younger and then the older of the two little brothers fell asleep, their heads on each of the mother’s thighs. The girl had asked once if she could go to the toilet, and the stepfather had put the key in the door and opened it and said to the mother that now was the time if she wanted to go too, but the mother had just shaken her head, and he had locked the door behind them and gone with the stepdaughter to the nearest of the sixteen bathrooms and toilets and waited outside the door like an armed sentry or bouncer at a post-Soviet discotheque and had let her walk past him back toward the sitting-room door, which he had unlocked and let her through and then locked again behind them and put the key in his pocket. At no point during the night had he sat down, now and then he walked back and forth in front of the fireplace, again like a sentry, and late in the night he had suddenly vanished into the adjoining room and returned with the gun in one hand and the dish of cold and long-since dried-up supper leftovers in the other, placing it in front of them on the coffee table, but neither she nor the mother touched the food; a couple of times the girl had briefly dozed off and then woken up again, the second or third time it was beginning to get light and the mother still hadn’t said a word, not since her apparently last and decisive word, the stepfather’s name: Mads. Suddenly the normally perfectly behaved dog, which had and knew its place out in the large scullery behind the kitchen far away at the other end of the house, started to howl. For a while they sat on the sofa listening to the dog’s peculiar and melancholy and disconsolate howling, the younger of the two brothers woke up and rubbed his eyes and said, what’s that, Mom? The mother didn’t answer, just stroked his hair soothingly and looked at the stepfather. He didn’t say a word, just stood at attention as he had done for most of the last twelve or fourteen hours. Then he walked across to the door, purposefully, like a soldier, unlocked it and went out, leaving it wide open behind him, and vanished off to the other end of the house. They remained seated in their places on the sofa for a few minutes, listening to the dog’s howling turn into a chastened but delighted whimpering, then a door slammed in the distance and a moment later they saw the stepfather and the dog walk across the yard and out across the fields.

  Properly speaking, what the stepfather had said was true, she was just the result of an arbitrary screw. Her mother—being the youngest of the three siblings, the afterthought, her father’s “shining little angel”—had always been given everything she pointed at, and was allowed to do exactly what she wanted. Unlike her two older, disciplined and conscientious siblings, she didn’t go straight from lower secondary school to upper secondary school, but at the age of just sixteen had moved in with her first boyfriend, Jesper, a tall and fair and shy young man who, like her, came from a good family. And one night after or perhaps even during a dorm party, when the boyfriend just didn’t happen to be there, and she’d had a drop too much to drink, she had spent a long time chatting with an irresistible dark-complexioned and almost black-eyed Jewish guy, who it later turned out had been just fifteen years old (but apparently rather mature sexually), and had apparently also had it off with him. At any rate, she got pregnant, which at that time, when the pill had just been invented, wasn’t only unfortunate, but also fairly idiotic when you were just sixteen years of age, and neither she nor her boyfriend had so much as started further education yet. But she didn’t try to hide anything, she and the boyfriend loved one another, sooner or later they’d have a child anyway, so why not now when it had happened quite naturally (she had long since forgotten the little affair during the dorm party (and it really was little, the whole thing had lasted ten-fifteen minutes tops), at any rate she couldn’t see why she should think anything of it, it was nothing, it was Jesper the boyfriend she loved, there had been no doubt at any point, and purely in terms of statistics it was impossible, it could only be Jesper), the entire family was immediately informed of the good news and was of course somewhat surprised, the two older siblings came home to the ritual Sunday lunch in the parents’ house and had already taken the necessary decision, the elder sister gave her little sister a shrill telling-off, while the older brother, who was the eldest and read law at the University of Copenhagen, waited calmly for the right moment, whereupon he pronounced judgment: there was nothing to discuss, a termination must be arranged, of course, and as swiftly as possible. The mother wept and the father, sitting in his place in the big leather chair by the window, looked his daughter in the eye and nodded in a fatherly fashion. She idolized her father, and equally her older brother, she put them above every other living soul, including the boyfriend and every one of the boyfriends and husbands she would later have, throughout her life she always listened, and with the deepest gravity, to the advice and decisions her older brother had and had taken regarding her future, and always did everything she could to follow them. Also now, of course, she accepted his decision. She just couldn’t act on it. She was going to have a baby. The boyfriend had also been present throughout the entire session, he was standing right behind her and didn’t say a word. He was terrified and proud. When the beech trees came into leaf, she gave birth to a lovely little daughter, and a few months later she started at upper secondary level evening school. On weekdays the girl was looked after at her maternal grandparents’ home, she quickly became accustomed to being bottle-fed, and very soon she was more or less living with her grandparents and just occasionally visiting her mother and the boyfriend in their student dorm room, which was not really purpose-made for a child. For the first year babies just look like babies, but after a year or so the grandmother told her husband that it seemed for all the world as if the girl’s eyes were going to be brown; could you have brown eyes if both your parents were blue-eyed? The father summoned the daughter home and had a one-on-one conversation with her, blue eyes staring into blue eyes, and the daughter said that there had never been anything else at all, just the once and it had meant absolutely nothing, to her there was only one who was the father and that was the one she loved. The father was nonetheless of the opinion that she ought to have a chat with her boyfriend and, as always and as far as was humanly possible, she followed her father’s advice. That very evening she told her Jesper that he might not be the girl’s father, but he refused to listen, he had difficulty breathing, his eyes shone manically and he hissed that this was totally insane, she must have mommy brain, from not breast-feeding, that she was perverted, it was his child, she was exactly like he had been, both his mother and his father said so, he could feel it, she was his daughter and he would never let any other man come between them, over his dead body. Later on, the father also tried to speak to his son-in-law, in confidence, but nothing could be done. As the years passed, it became increasingly apparent that the girl bore no likeness whatsoever to her father, or to her mother come to that; she wasn’t slim and fair and spikey, but round and soft and brown-eyed. It was obvious to everyone, apart from the man who saw himself as her father, and then of course the girl, who was still too young to be able to see herself as anything other than a foregone conclusion. When she was three years old, the grandfather sold the elegant and renowned seaside hotel in the north of Sealand, which he and his wife had run in recent years, and they moved to a small mountain village high up in the Canary Islands, and the girl went with them, started at the local village school, spoke Spanish with her Spanish girlfriends and looked exactly like a little Spanish lass, one of the dark-complexioned ones with Moorish ancestors and almost black-brown eyes. Her tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed parents visited a couple of times a year, and she proudly showed them off to her Spanish girlfriends, who thought they looked like something from a fairytale, fairies or angels. They had met when both were very young, and as they approached twenty they started growing apart, or rather, she grew apart from him (as she later said: I’m actually very old-fashioned, I’m faithful to my husbands
, each and every one, for seven years on end. But what about me? the girl shouted. Stina! said the mother, you are of course an exception! And then she laughed, and as always the girl was outraged), she met someone else and they moved in together, and from then on the two fairies or angels visited separately, but they were still just as much her parents. After six years spent as a little Spanish girl in a Spanish school, who like all her Spanish girlfriends and their siblings and parents and grandparents prayed to God and wept loudly and inconsolably and for days on end when the great Generalissimo Franco died, her mother, who had in the meantime married a dogged young man with a small, fair mustache and the good Nordic name Mads, son of an enterprising businessman from mid-Sealand, and had moved with him to a small detached house on the outskirts of the town where he worked as an up-and-coming clerk in the local bank, and was expecting his (yes, his, this time there was no doubt (either)) child, decided to bring her daughter home from the Canary Islands so she could grow up alongside her little sister or brother and attend a Danish school and become a Danish girl. The little Spanish girl with the colorful Catholic scheme of things was put in one of the utterly ordinary Danish provincial elementary schools, which at that time were still ethnically pure and without so much as a hint of anything worryingly foreign, and now she didn’t look like her parents or her girlfriends and their parents, but something quite different, something both thrilling and exotic, but also always different, and, like every other child, in the early years she too just had to live with the fact that that’s how it was and how she was. But deep down, in the Catholic scheme of things she had brought along from the village in the Canary Islands, the true story gradually took shape: she had, of course, been adopted, her parents or grandparents had of course found her among other foundlings at a children’s home down in Las Palmas and had initially tried to take her directly to Denmark, but that had proven to be disastrous, she had wasted away in the cold and dark alien north, and as she lay on her deathbed the grandfather, being the Danish hero and Viking he was, had taken the most vital decision of his life, in great haste he had sold his beloved seaside hotel and with his wife and the young dying princess he had moved to the Canary Islands, high up in the mountains, far from the town with its noise and pollution (a word with which she first became acquainted when she was again taken to Denmark and “detained” in the Danish elementary school class where it was one of the buzz words of the day, the girls and boys having heard their parents and Danish teacher use it, and they in turn had heard it on the television news), in the clear mountain air into which she had been born some time ago and which was now her only hope. One afternoon, when she had just turned twelve years of age and was for once alone with her mother in the kitchen while the boys were either out in the garden or were momentarily playing relatively amicably in their room, she took a deep breath and spoke The Truth: Mom, I know that Jesper isn’t my real father and that you aren’t my real mother, you just adopted me! The mother turned from the cutting board on which she was chopping onions for the meatballs and gazed at her for a long time. And then she said that wasn’t true, she really was her real mother, but it was correct that Jesper wasn’t her biological father, he was called Jacob. All was silent for a moment, neither the mother nor the daughter knew what to say, they just stared at one another. Then the mother walked past her and out into the entrance hall, put down the knife, picked up the telephone and dialed a number and spoke for a long time, first with the one then with the other, then a third and possibly a fourth and fifth and sixth before she eventually hung up and came back into the kitchen and said that actually she had thought it would be impossible, like finding a needle in a haystack, she said, but now she had succeeded, she had got hold of someone who knew him and who had given her his number, and, yes, she had in fact just spoken with him, he lived all the way over in southern Jutland now, but tomorrow he would drive over to them in Sealand to see her. No-o! the girl screamed, nothing else, just “no-o!” she wept uncontrollably and hysterically and threw herself onto the floor and got up and ran into her room and ripped all the pop posters off the walls and dived onto the bed with her head at the wrong end and burrowed her face into the duvet and screamed and hoped she would be suffocated. By the time stepfather Mads arrived home from the bank, she had calmed down a little, but she was still lying on the bed, and the mother told the stepfather that the daughter was ill and had a fever and unfortunately she probably wouldn’t be well enough to go to school next day, and the stepfather said she’d have to sort that out herself, he walked past the door to her room without looking in and flopped down in the corner sofa in the sitting room and switched on the television, and the mother followed with his coffee. All night long the girl lay awake imagining her truly real and far-fetched and apparently also “biological” father, tall and muscular and Spanish Jewish, a bit like a gypsy chieftain, one of those who occasionally turned up at the village in the mountains with his harem of dancing and singing women and girls of her own age with bare dirty feet and little bells around their ankles, and who wore big chunky rings of gold not just on the ring finger like grandfather, but on all eight or nine remaining digits. Next morning, after the stepfather had left for the bank, she got up and dressed, not in a gypsy princess outfit, but like a perfectly ordinary Danish girl in her most recently purchased clothes, from the cheapest of the three boutiques on the main street, and sat down to wait on the chair by the telephone in the entrance hall. At one thirty—one-and-a-half hours after the appointed time, and after she had long since become hysterical and had shouted at her mother that it was all a lie, that it was just something she, the mother, had made up, and that any idiot and even the boys in her class could see she was adopted—a large, round and soft and dark-skinned and almost completely black-haired already-balding young man, the sun making the top of his head shine, walked up the driveway and stepped onto the doorstep and rang the bell. Mom! she whispered, what shall I do! Open the door, of course, her mother said calmly from the kitchen. I can’t! she whispered. And then she opened the door. The father, who had just turned twenty-eight and—apart from that one time eleven years earlier, when he had been sixteen and more or less lived or at least hung out in the recently liberated Freetown Christiania military base, and where a beautiful slim fair-haired young hippie he vaguely remembered having seen once before somewhere or other, maybe during a Steppenwolf concert, had emerged from the hash haze and walked toward him with a straw basket on her arm, and had carefully lifted a scarf from the basket and said, look, your daughter!, not that he had been able to see anything, he was too stoned, it was too fuzzy, the light from the stage flickered, and the basket was dark, or catch what the young woman had said, for that matter, or hear it as anything other than just one of those things you said, like “love” and “peace” and “if we think really hard, maybe we can stop this rain”—had never seen his daughter and had in fact forgotten or never really grasped that he even had a daughter, and therefore, despite his “artistic” temperament, couldn’t picture the yesterday so-abruptly-announced twelve-year-old daughter as anything other than a sweet little girl, he simply didn’t look at the almost full-grown girl with large soft breasts who opened the door, he stared with nervous curiosity past her shoulder, looking out for the real little girl, his daughter, who had to be in there somewhere behind the step-sister or paternal aunt or nanny (or whatever she was) who had answered the door when he rang the bell. It’s me! she said in a very small voice, overcome and forlorn, and then he saw her. It was like standing face to face with his missing sister, the closest he had ever been to seeing himself in someone else. But he couldn’t believe that this young woman in front of him was meant to be his daughter, and maybe he never took it in for real during the few years they were to know one another. And what is your name? he said. Christina, she said, or just Stina. Stina, he said. And neither of them said anything else. A minute passed, and then the mother came out and said his name and invited him in for a cup of coffee. They sat in the kitche
n for an hour, and the mother chattered on in her clear and vigorously vivacious and urbane voice, while the father just sat there like a big, heavy and melancholy boy grasping the coffee cup in his lap with both hands, and nodded and glanced evasively from the one of these two total strangers to the other, from the tall upright fair woman to the round, soft, brown-eyed young woman, from the mother and to the daughter, who just stared at him. Well, he eventually said, I should probably be on my way now. After some years spent in the hash hazes and various communes in the vicinity of Copenhagen, he had got together with a handful of people his own age who wanted to do something, create a completely new world of love and community and solidarity, and given that the revolution, which was of course the only option, was also somewhat abstract and hard to get going, they started by setting up a group theater, one of the “floating islands” where life and art, work and leisure, revolution and reproduction, formed a synthesis, which was a sign of the times, and they moved back to nature, all the way over to Jutland, where hardly any of them had ever set foot before, and rented a dilapidated mansion or an abandoned mill on the outskirts of a smallish town and lived together in a little communal Utopia, where life and art and work and leisure, production and consumption formed a synthesis, and no one had his or her own room, own lover, or own underpants, even the pill and tampons and concomitant menstruation were just as much the men’s responsibility and property as the women’s. At first, the local community, which consisted mainly of native-born southern Jutlanders, was skeptical of this sudden invasion of Copenhagen hippies with their unrelenting clowning and Chinese propaganda and opium plants in the front yard, but on the other hand the State, even back then, and unlike the State in the larger European countries, was above all disposed to listen to what its citizens had to say, and to accommodate their wishes and their new ways of living, so within a couple of years their little Utopia had already been granted the status of regional theater with municipal funding, annual budgets and accounts, and the obligation to tour throughout the district. And while the old reactionary world (order) thus proved to be more than commodious in also embracing its own opposite, revolution and the new world, in the long run it turned out that life in the little new world was more than utopian enough. The synthesis of life and art, work and leisure, individual and community, was in reality extremely claustrophobic, most of the members were swiftly possessed of an initially secret and mortifying longing to take time off now and then, not so much from working with the theater, which most of them still found fun, but chiefly from one another. Instead of a grand cosmic love, they got together two and two in small, indeed progressive but ultimately quite ordinary petit-bourgeois couples, and moved into one of the small row- or standard-houses that the State and its municipal authorities with exemplary provident timing allowed to sprout up around every town during this very period. In his case, it had turned out that the longing to take time off from one another now and then was not—unlike the outlook of the others—just a desire to separate work and leisure and have a bit of private life. The languor, which in the girl most people ultimately saw as being a provocative, unproductive pleasure-indulgence, was in him primarily a completely personal dromedary tempo. He wasn’t lazy, he could actually get things done, but that required him being allowed to work in rhythm with his own breath, which was by no means the tempo of the commune. Actually he preferred to be himself, not just in the new private life with his girlfriend, but also in the stage work making little plays for children aged six to twelve, now the last patch of Utopia where the group’s shows about another world still took place. To begin with, as an exception, he was allowed to do his own oneman shows, which the others in the group had to approve before he was given the okay to perform them for the rest of the old society, but after some years he opted completely out of the group and formed his own oneman theater, which wasn’t called the Theater of Cruelty or The Poor Theater, Chariot of the Sun, Odin or The Mill, but was just called by his name, the one he was and not anyone or anything else. As it happened, this very evening he was due to give a guest performance at a little theater in Copenhagen, which was why he’d had time almost without any prior notice to pop in and see the daughter he had no idea about, or had at least long since forgotten he had. He stood up and the mother, still chattering on euphorically about all the memories this reunion had suddenly brought flooding back, also stood up, and only the girl, who hadn’t said a word during the moment or half or whole hour the visit had lasted, remained seated. Stina! the mother said with a laugh, and so she got up, and father and daughter stood face to face, round and mild and soft and equally impotent, while the mother at their side laughed and said they resembled one another like two drops of heavy water. The half-bald young man suddenly opened his large arms and put them around her in a warm and sort of rocking embrace, not like a father, but something bigger, a big old animal, a bear maybe, something immensely safe and oceanic and far too overwhelming. He was about to say something, her name, “my all-grown-up girl,” just something, but he didn’t say a word. He let go of her and walked out of the door and down the driveway and a little way along the road, where the old van was parked, containing his one-man show about a different and better world where adults are just big children and life is a dream, got in and drove off. Over the next couple of years she visited him and his girlfriend a few times in their row-house on the outskirts of the little town in southern Jutland, and once in a blue moon, when he was doing a guest performance in Copenhagen, he might pop in for a cup of coffee during the afternoon while the stepfather was still at work in the bank. Just six months after the first visit, he and his girlfriend had a baby, and two years later they had one more. She called them “my little brother and little sister,” they didn’t look like her, they mostly took after their mother, small, delicate and fair, but when she visited them she saw how they quite instinctively crawled around his bulky frame and with their little feet sank into his soft stomach as if they were one flesh, one big and warm and alive and multi-armed body. She could see that he looked like her more than anyone else in the whole world, and every time they were together she made sure she was standing or sitting within his field of vision in the hope that he would (finally) catch sight of his daughter. But he continued to look at her as if she was just another grown-up girl, and he treated her like he treated everyone else: steadily and genially and patiently. She yearned for him to tell her off, be totally unreasonable and let fly at her like a proper father, and at times she was overcome by the intense anger and feeling of abandonment that is typical of a daughter, but none of it helped. Perhaps it had something to do with his very particular tempo, the sea-sluggish slowness they shared, perhaps he needed time, several years, maybe more, before eventually, one day, he would understand that he was her father. But within a few years it turned out that the self-same indolence he had passed on to her didn’t merely apply to his external organs—the soft face, the long swaying arms, the hefty, slightly drooping belly that spread in a soft belt right round to his back and overhung his waist and far too narrow hips—but also to his inner organs: some years after she and the two little ones had entered his world, the one kidney took a rest, was treated at the hospital, where they tried to get it working again, but after a year or so things looked doubtful and so a new one was ordered, and while he wandered around waiting for the new, third kidney, the second one failed; and many years later when the whole story and certainly “the endless summer” had definitely come to an end, and the delicate, slender young boy had fallen back into the other and far too ordinary world and had himself become a kind of actor, who made his own little solo shows and was giving guest performances in the provincial capital, a small and quite unremarkable woman he seemed to recall from another time in another world approached him and introduced herself as the theater administrator and asked if he recognized her. Yes, he said, yes yes, and plainly had no idea who she was. I’m Laust’s and Gedske’s mother, she said, Jacob’s partner. And Jacob? he said. For
a moment, endless and beyond any timescale, she simply looked at him, in deep surprise and utterly adrift. Then she took his hand. Jacob, she said, but he’s dead.